Winner, Book of the Year Award 2000 North American Society for the Sociology of Sport

FEATURES

The Rites of Men presents sport as a formidable political institution. It argues that the culture of sport instills deep ideological beliefs that animate and shape other ideologies of difference, inequality and entitlement -- first with respect to gender, but also of nation, race, class, ethnicity or locality.

Varda Burstyn's approach is multi-disciplinary, combining political science, economics, psychoanalysis and cultural criticism, and the book is packed with vivid examples ranging from the playing field to science-fiction action films. She makes a forceful case for the deep connection between the power of ritual in culture and the power of specific groups -- in the case of sport, elite men and the values that support them -- in society as a whole.

The book suggests that the success of sport lies in how it has "filled the father gap" of the "absent-" and "remote-father" family systems of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. It discusses this crucial function in practical and symbolic terms, and looks at the implications of this analysis for childhood, for gender relations, and for political life.

Rites further argues that the core men's sports today are a culturally accepted mechanism for the selective brutalization of males, carried out in the service of maintaining a warrior-based ideal of masculinity suitable to a deeply stratified society; and that this brutalization is fundamental to boyhood and to adult masculinity across the broad culture of sport.

Rites links the consequences for belief systems and identities engendered by the culture of sport and by what Varda has called "coercive entitlement", its characteristic ideology, to the political behaviour of ordinary people and to the actions, values and influence of political, economic and military elites.

Varda Burstyn shows how, despite sport's egalitarian rhetoric, it has played a largely regressive role in political culture by keeping beliefs about inequality and domination alive at the heart of ideals of masculinity, and by sustaining ideals of masculinity at the heart of wider ideals of heroism and community.

In a timely discussion of neo-liberal economics and neo-conservative politics, Burstyn convincingly demonstrates how the masculinist culture of sport is powerfully implicated in the evolution and power of these ideologies.

The Rites of Men also addresses the important issues of the homosocial and homoerotic dimensions of sport. These issues are rarely addressed, and even more rarely discussed in the context of the political functions of sport culture.

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"Bingo! Varda Burstyn has done it. This extraordinary book is a first. With great intelligence and insight it underlines the centrral role sport plays in the 'making of men' in modern Western culture. It should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in the pervasive influence of sport today. What she writes is true: major spectator sport creates and reinforces the cultural matrix that underpins our capitalist political economy. If you want to discover how it all came about, read this book."
DAVID MEGGYESY, Wester Director, National Footbal League Players Association (NFLPA)

"This is a stunning book.
I can think of few other works that successfully take on as
many themes in contemporary political and cultural theory"
KAREN DUBINKSY, Dept. of History, Queen's University

Interested? You can order the book from the University of Toronto Press. It's also available at fine bookstores everywhere.